March 1, 2014

Exciting News! We Are Building A New Home!

Hello friends!

I am so excited to tell that you that my husband and I have just signed the papers to begin building a new home!

My husband and I have been discussing for a while the need to get a home with a yard and a bigger garage. We love our current home but don't love those two aspects of it. We also love our current neighborhood, the schools, and our church community, so we didn't want to move far. A different builder was currently building in our same neighborhood and had only a few lots left, so we decided that it was the right time.

Here is a view of our empty lot. The view of the mountains and the fields behind us are really gorgeous. The lot extends to the tan fence you see in the background. Behind us is just farmland that should not be developed anytime in the near future. The lot is nearly half an acre, which is going to be plenty for our needs and plans. We are really excited about finally having a yard big enough to put in a big garden, fruit trees, and playground for the kids.

For our new home, we chose a 3-bedroom rambler, which will become 6 bedrooms when we finish the basement (which we expect to do within the first year). This will make for tight quarters for the kids for a little while, but well worth it in the end.

While we would love to make this into our dream home from day one, we don't have the necessary funds to that. So, we have decided to put the majority of our money to make the house structurally what we would like it to be and will make changes in the finishes over time. We have a vision of what we would like our house to be eventually and will slowly work to make it into our dream home.

From these plans you can see some of the structural options available. We bumped out the back wall and the side wall two feet. We also extended the garage to a 4-car garage for my husband's workshop. We also pushed out the front of the garages two feet. We did the optional covered patio on the back (just the roof, we didn't have them do the deck because we can do that ourselves later). We did 9-foot ceilings on both the main floor and the basement and did chose to do a walk-out basement. We want the basement to be a full apartment once it gets finished in case any of the kids ever come back to live with us or if financially we ever need to rent it out.

We have a lot of choices to make over the next few weeks before we head to the design center. They should start digging in about 6 weeks and hope to be completed around the middle of August. I will continue to update the blog with posts here and there as is comes along!